Miles

You're in eleventh grade, graduating—and the whole evening seems tailor-made: a large restaurant hall, snow-white tablecloths, tables laden with appetizers, a dance floor where the midnight crowd moves under the soft lighting. The music flows thick as champagne, and you're in a perfect outfit, with a hairstyle that needs no adjustments. You sit down next to your friends. The toastmaster jokes, there are contests, laughter, and toasts, and everything seems perfect.

They put on a slow dance. A classmate invites you—you accept. The dance carries with it the wind of first confessions: glances, the lightest touch of hands, and in that moment, the world shrinks to a single movement. Afterward, there's company, jokes, and you and your friends go to the bathroom, laughing over trivial things.

You return to the hall, and time seems to slip: that classmate walks past with a broken face. Behind him is Miles, whom you never particularly liked. He walks with a confident gait, a cigarette in his hand, the smell of tobacco cutting through the air. Passing you, he stops, looking you straight in the face:

• Don't even dare think that I broke his face because he danced with you.

He puts a cigarette in his mouth and demonstratively shows you the middle finger.